Topics Knowledge

Question To understand something you need to rely on your own experience and culture. Does this mean that it is impossible to have an objective knowledge?

Accepted:
February 24, 2008

Comments

The short answer is "no".

It might take "experience" and "culture" (in a broad sense) to understand some sentence or other representation M. But it certainly doesn't follow from this that we can't know (as "objectively" as you like) whether M is correct.

For a stark illustration of the point, take the case where M is a bit of mathematics, e.g. take the claim "There is an infinite number of prime numbers".

Tounderstand this statement you have to call on some background experience in elementary mathematics (the use of numbers in counting and so on). We might say that to understand thissentence requires being inducted into a bit of mathematical "culture". But the fact that your understanding of this claim might besaid to rely on your mathematical "culture" in some broad sense,doesn't mean that (once you've got the understanding) you can'tacquire objective knowledge whether the claim is true. In fact,the claim is a theorem, and you can get knowledge of its truth-- objective mathematical knowledge, by any sane standards -- by following one of the proofs.

Here's another illustration of the same basic point. Take the case where M is a road map. There are a lot of conventions involved in plotting the roads and landmarks (in maps produced in remote countries, the conventions can be rather different). To understand the map you need to understand which lines indicate which sorts of roads, which indicate railways or rivers; you need to understand that the width of the lines indicating roads is not on the same scale as the rest of the map; you need to understand which landmark symbols mean what; and there's more besides in learning to use such a map. We might reasonably say: to properly understand the map you have to get inducted, in some small way, into the cultural practice of map-making/map-reading.

But the fact that understanding maps requires acquiring a bit of "culture" (in the broad sense) plainly doesn't mean that what a map tells you once you understand it can't be objectively right or wrong. Cambridge is north of London; and a map that says otherwise has simply got it wrong. But in fact, though maps can make mistakes, those produced by responsible agencies are hugely reliable. So they will give you geographical knowledge (again "objective" knowledge in any reasonable sense). For example, from Google maps you can get to know that Oxford is less than a hundred miles west of Cambridge.

Question To understand something you need to rely on your own experience and culture. Does this mean that it is impossible to have an objective knowledge? Accepted:February 24, 2008

Question To understand something you need to rely on your own experience and culture. Does this mean that it is impossible to have an objective knowledge?

Accepted:
February 24, 2008